Modern telecommunication satellites use antenna arrays and beamforming techniques to improve the link quality. The antenna array comprises multiple antenna elements. A signal from a remote communication device (terrestrial-based or airborne-based) is detected at each of these elements and the resulting signals are linearly (weighted and) combined to achieve the optimum performance for a link between the satellite and the remote communication device. The beamforming weights take into account the position of the user, the position of the satellite, calibration data for the antenna elements, satellite attitude, etc. The remote communication device is often referred to as a “user”.
When the user and/or the satellite are moving, the optimal beamforming weights vary in time, and must be recomputed with some periodicity to stay current with the position of the user with respect to the satellite. The beamforming weights also must be recomputed for each new user. If a satellite serves multiple, dynamic (moving) users, the required electronic circuitry and the computational burden become a serious obstacle in performing satellite beamforming onboard. This resulted in the introduction of the ground-based beamforming.
In a ground-based beamforming (GBBF) system, signals from the antenna elements of the satellite are transmitted over downlink channels to a ground-based terminal (gateway), and then subsequently combined to ensure a quality link to each user. Ground-based beamforming is virtually free from the resource limitations of the satellite onboard beamforming; however, it faces limitations of a different kind. Transmission of signals from multiple antenna elements requires a significant amount of bandwidth between the satellite and the gateway.
An amalgamation of these two methods forms some number of antenna beams onboard, and transmits the resulting signals to the ground-based gateway, where they are further combined to form one beam for each user. In this method, the onboard beamforming involves the use of fixed, pre-computed weights, which relieves the onboard satellite systems of all the computations required to form beams for multiple, dynamic users. The number of beams formed by the satellite is smaller than the number of antenna elements. This relaxes the bandwidth requirements for the downlink channels to the gateway. Thus, a combination of the onboard beamforming and ground-based beamforming produces a compromise, which may be suitable for some applications.
At one bandwidth extreme, if signals from all of the elements are downlinked to the ground-base gateway, the ground-based beamforming will have enough flexibility to achieve maximum performance for each user. The downside of this approach is that a substantial amount of bandwidth is required to downlink a large number of signals. At the opposite extreme, if the onboard beamforming forms and downlinks just a few signals, the required bandwidth is low, but the ground-based beamforming may not achieve acceptable quality. What is needed is a technique for selecting a compromise configuration that has moderate bandwidth requirements and achieves an acceptable link quality.